This site was created with the intention of investigating the education system in British Columbia, Canada. Although test scores can be quite informative, I believe they can be misleading–the difficulty of tests can fluctuate dramatically, effectively resulting in student grades also fluctuating. As such, our metric of choice was grade-to-grade transition rates. These rates do not reflect the quality of the education too accurately, but they are a very good indicator of how much support the British Columbian government is providing to its youth. As such, our questions are as follows:
How has the British Columbian Government’s educational support (as indicated by grade-to-grade transition rates) in the past 30 years differed in different kinds of schools, as well as for different types of British Columbian students (i.e., Indigenous? Special needs?)? Are there any other specific attributes that lead to a lower/higher quality of educational support?
Note that this is quite a complex question, and so naturally, a lot of data is required to answer it. Thus, this website uses various open data from British Columbia. Our main dataset of interest is the 1992-2021 data on grade-to-grade transition rates published by British Columbia Education Analytics. This dataset consists of information on a provincial, district, and school level. Additional information gathered from supplementary datasets. A dataset on class Sizes from 2006 to 2021 provides us information on all three levels, but here we mainly use it on the school level. For the district level, we used a dataset regarding each district’s office and a dataset regarding British Columbian Teachers for each district.
If you wish to see the Github repository for this site, you can find it here.
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Our data came in the form of 3 ‘.xlsx’ files containing information regarding BC grade-to-grade transitions on a provincial, district and school level, while the data regarding the location of the offices of each district was in the form of a ‘.csv’ file. The three ‘.xlsx’ files each contained information on different periods: one file contained information from 1992/93 to 2000/01, another contained information from 2000/01 to 2010/11, and our last one contained information from 2010/11 to 2020/21. There are many rows in each of the ‘.xlsx’ files (the first had 374654, the second had 541501, and the third had 536978), but it is also worth noting that the data was not tidy, as some rows recorded data on “all students” whilst other rows recorded data on “Indigenous students”, so each row should not be treated as its own observation. Then, we combined our data into one large data table, and removed entries in our table with missing data.
#WORK IN PROGRESS (Describe how the additional datasets were dealt with)Before doing anything meaningful, we should first do some exploratory data analysis. Based on the structure of the data, I felt as though it would be most appropriate to look at the situation from all three levels. We begin by making interactive figures to understand the situation from a provincial and district level. We will also perform model fitting on a school level. By mimicking the structure of our data, we can make the most out of it!
#WORK IN PROGRESS (A lot of the existing work is from the Midterm)\[\\[0.2in]\]
Prior to doing anything, let’s do some exploratory data analysis. You can see the plots and analysis that were made for the provincial, district and school levels in the corresponding tabs.
Below is an interactive plot that shows the grade-to-grade transition rates over time. Using the drop menus located on the lower right corner of the grid, we can tweak our population of interest. The axis is fixed for ease of comparison, but you can always zoom in. We can observe various things by tweaking the settings of the plot. Below are just a few discoveries that I found.
Province-Total and All Students setting, we can see that overall, as time went by, the percentage of students that successfully transitioned to the next grade increased. This is the most prominent for students in grades 8-11. It is also worth noting that the percentage of students in grades 10/11 that successfully transition to the next grade are significant lower than the percentage of students in the lower grades that successfully transition.All Students but altering the top dropdown between BC Public School and BC Independent School, we can see that the rates of grade transitions for students of BC public schools are lower than that of BC independent schools, but the increase in the rate of successful grade transitions is significantly higher in public schools. Furthermore, private schools (i.e., independent schools) seem to have a much higher rate of transition, especially for grade levels 8 and above. This does make sense, as private schools are often times more expensive, and so the students attending them naturally live in my affluent families.Province-Total but altering the bottom dropdown between Indigenous and Non Indigenous, we can see that the rate of successful grade transitions is significantly lower in Indigenous students compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts. We can also see that the increase in the rates of grade transitions over the years is higher for Indigenous students compared to non-Indigenous students.Province-Total but altering the bottom dropdown between Non Special Needs and Special Needs, we can see that the rate of successful grade transitions is significantly lower in special needs students compared to students without special needs.\[\\[0.1in]\]
Figure 1: An interactive graph depicting the percentage of students in BC of each grade level that successfully transition to the next grade between the years 1993 and 2020.
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Below are two interactive plots. Figure 2 displays the individual data for each of the districts, whilst Figure 3 consists of the summary of all the districts for each year. The dropdown menus for both plots allow you to select a specific grade and population. The axis is fixed for ease of comparison, but you can always zoom in (or hover your mouse to see more details). There are many interesting things you can find with the interactive plots. Below are just a few findings:
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Figure 2: An interactive graph depicting the percentage of high school BC students that successfully transition to the next grade between the years 1993 and 2020.
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